Rockstars ?

One of my granddaughters attends a California State school, as opposed to a school in the University of California system. Keep in mind that both the U.C. schools and the Cal-State schools are both supposed to be for educating Californians. However, when my granddaughter was a freshman her roommate was from Connecticut. I thought naively that this Connecticut roommate must be really “a rockstar” to have been admitted to a Cal-State school across the country from her home on the East coast.  However, it turned out that her SAT scores were actually not that good, and her high school GPA., while good, was far from outstanding. When I learned that this Connecticut roommate was not “a rockstar,” I was perplexed. Was she a legacy of some sort? Apparently not.

Likewise, it was very unlikely that she was a product of a Willam Singer-like scheme to get marginal students into prestigious universities, as while Cal-State schools are good, they are not prestigious, and the Connecticut family was not rich. (For those of you not familiar with William “Rick” Singer, he had a “Pay- to-Play” scheme to get rich kids into various prestigious, mainly private, universities, like Georgetown and U.S.C. Some of the tactics that Mr. Singer used were more that just unethical; they were criminal. Mr. Singer has pleaded guilty, and will be sentenced soon. Bribes were paid to do nefarious things that were clearly beyond the pale, and some of those that paid the outlandish “bribes” will also be sentenced soon.)The almost universal response to this “Pay-to-Pay” was shock and being aghast.
However being the contrarian that I am, let’s look at this from a somewhat different angle. There are graduates of certain universities that routinely give a fair amount of money to their alma-maters. Do they expect that their children will be moved to the head of the list when they apply to said university? Yes! Does this happen frequently? Yes! Are these “legacy admissions” criminal or even unethical? No, they are occurring regularly, and no one tries to keep them covered up. Do these legacy admissions deprive some students further down the line from getting into said university? Probably. Is this wrong? Aah! . . . now we are getting into the real world! 

What is the difference between rich Joe Blow giving ‘x’-amount of dollars over many years to “buy” the legacy admission of his kids to said university, and the rich non-alumnus giving a large one time “contribution” of the same cumulative amount (‘x’) to accomplish the same purpose? To my way of thinking . . . Not much! (And if said university were to use this ‘x’  to help some deserving, but poor individual, attend that same university on this ‘scholarship’ money, all the better, and perhaps these “buy-ins” could be encouraged. Everybody wins!)

Which gets me back to the roommate from Connecticut. Why was she here? Ah yes, the lure of the sunshine here in California. But how and why was she accepted to a highly competitive Cal-State school? As I have said before, when one is faced with an apparent dilemma, look at the money. Thousands of out of state and foreign students are accepted each year at Cal-State and U.C. schools, while thousands of California high school seniors are rejected. Why is that? I guess it could be that these non-resident students are rockstars, but this was not the case with the Connecticut roommate. In fact, the California State Auditor recently found that the average SAT scores and grades of out-of-state students were lower than those of in-state students, and that state universities had rejected 4,500 Californians whose test scores and grades were good enough for out-of-state and foreign students!

Again, it’s all about the money, as out-of-State and foreign students pay significantly higher tuition compared to the tuition paid by in-state students.So to me, it is easy to condemn rich people for attempting to buy acceptance into some universities for their children, but is anybody condemning those who are accepting those dubiously qualified non-resident students into Cal-State and U.C. schools? Does the saying of a friend of mine apply here? . . . “We all know what we are, and are just haggling about the price!”